Why a lap steel retunes
A lap steel has no frets to press and no chord shape to hold. The bar lies straight across the strings and the picks choose which of them sound, so the chord under the bar is whatever the open strings make, moved up the neck. That makes the tuning the instrument's chord vocabulary: change the six open notes and you change which chords a straight bar can reach, and which ones need a slant.
C6 is this site's standard, and every lap steel chord, scale and progression page is drawn in it. The other five tunings here are the ones the network's lap steel chord pages already offer when a chord has no shape in C6: A6, E13, Open E, Open G and the high-G C6.
How each tuning is worked out
Three things are computed for every tuning, never typed:
- Which strings move. Each string is compared with C6, and the move shown is the nearest one that reaches the new note. It is a count of semitones, not a recipe: a long move usually means a string set made for that tuning.
- What the open strings ring as. Every chord whose notes are exactly the open strings' notes. A sixth tuning rings as two chords at once, the way C6 is also Am7, and both names are given.
- Which chord types a bar spells. A straight bar at one fret sounds every string whose note is in the chord; a short slant reaches three adjacent strings stepping one fret each. At least three strings have to speak, two for a bare fifth. Because the bar slides, a chord type is spelled on every root or on none.
Where the rows come from
No row on this site rests on one source. Each tuning is printed, string for string, by at least two independent sources, named and quoted at the foot of its page with the order they print the strings in. Several rows travel under the names A6, E13 and high-G C6, so each of those pages says which row it publishes, and why that one.